Showing posts with label gardening. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gardening. Show all posts

Monday, 10 May 2010

Furzey Gardens

Over the weekend we enjoyed a fantastic family day out at Furzey Gardens in the New Forest. It's a beautiful garden with breathtaking azaleas, wildlife, thatching projects, an art gallery, and a lake with lily pads. Goregous and very peaceful. What we really loved about Furzey, though, was that Furzey is a fairy land. That's right: fairies. All over the garden there's evidence of fairies: tiny doors in the sides of trees, miniature boats and bridges, fairy sized notic boards, etc.

The girls LOVED finding where all of the fairies live (and even got to see one up in the trees! They stayed very still and quiet so they wouldn't scare her off.). It was really exciting to go around Furzey Gardens finding all the secret little fairy spots. (Jared was by far the best at spotting them.) Miriam and Anya tried knocking at the doors, but most of the fairies were a bit shy. It was a lot of fun and Furzey really made a great family day out.










To see more pictures from Furzey Gardens, click here.

Monday, 10 August 2009

Introduction

Starting a brand new blog is a bit intimidating. It's all set up: there's a big title along the top of the page, and ads line the sidebar. I could google myself and find it. The only problem is that there's no content yet.

I feel a bit like I did when I just walked into my garden after being away on holiday. Our house-sitter hadn't touched the garden, and so it was left free to run wild. The grass in the lawn was like a meadow. I opened the gate on the white fence enclosing the vegetable patch to find morning glories wrapped tightly around the branches of my apple trees, and my carefully planted rows of vegetables invisible under a jungle of stinging nettles and dandelions. It was so overgrown that I almost didn't know where to start.

In my garden, I started with the simplest and most obvious task. I pulled out the lawnmower and cut the grass. With a blog, I'll start simple too, and explain why I'm starting it.

For the past few years, I've created content for websites. Mostly I write articles on a wide variety of topics. I love doing this, but these articles are mostly informative, and rarely have pictures. I wanted to try something more personal, to be able to share photos and anecdotes of my daily life. Like many people I know, I'm trying to balance a career with domestic aspirations. I'm married and have two young children. I have dreams of having a clean, organized home, filling our time with fun and educational activities (all of which will be documented in scrapbooks, of course), and cooking with local organic ingredients (preferably from our own garden).

If, like me, you're trying to balance professional aspirations with domestic yearnings, then my blog's for you.